View full sizeLeroy Hill with Debbie Hill following the completion of an expansion at Hill & Brooks Coffee Company, in this file photo taken Jan 15, 1992, in Mobile, Ala. (Press-Register/G.M. Andrews)

For years, Leroy Hill's popular coffee has been served in restaurants, office break rooms and family kitchens across the South.

Now, the future of Hill's coffee kingdom - the question of who should own it following his death - is being battled in court.

His children claim in a lawsuit that they spent years helping build their father's Mobile-based business on the promise that it would one day be their own. That pact, they say, was typed up and signed by their father and kept in his fireproof safe.

But when Hill died last year, his will in Mobile County Probate Court awarded the business to his second wife, Debbie Hill, a secretary whom he had married after divorcing the mother of his four kids, according to court records.

"To just wait and wait and wait and finally, when your dad dies, you find out he has broken his solemn word ... it's pretty devastating " said the children's lawyer, Vincent Kilborn.

He added, "They believed in their father."

Debbie Hill's lawyer, Mark Spear, said there's no proof that an inheritance agreement with his children ever existed, and they've never been able to produce a copy of it.

"Mrs. Hill is following his wishes," Spear said. "She is trying to comply with his wishes in running the company the way he wanted it run."

What's at stake are the business, likely worth millions of dollars, and Leroy Hill's 4,000-acre Grand Bay farm, which includes a 25,000-square-foot mansion.

The lawsuit filed by the children maintains that Leroy Hill persuaded his first wife, Bonnie Hill, his wife of 29 years, not to seek a share in the company during their divorce negotiations in 1983.

In return, he promised to grant her a $1 million life insurance payment and leave the company and farm to their four children, according to the lawsuit.

But, the lawsuit claims, Hill did not disclose that he'd been having an eight-year affair with eventual wife Debbie Hill, a onetime secretary.

Kilborn said the agreement was typed by Hill's daughter, signed by him with witnesses and locked away in his safe.

"Well, guess what?" Kilborn said. "After Leroy died, the agreement doesn't seem to be around anymore. Somebody got it, and somebody either destroyed it or it's still there somewhere, but we're going to get to the bottom of it. It would be nice if it would turn up. I doubt if it ever will, just because of Leroy's nature. As we look back on it, Leroy was not a nice guy."

The promised life insurance payment for his former wife, the lawsuit claims, was also left out of the will.

Meanwhile, the children had to "endure constant verbal abuse and haranguing from their father day after day while continuing to work for him in a family farm and business" the lawsuit says.

Hill began selling coffee in 1953 after returning from the Korean War, where he served as an Army Ranger. In 1961, his brother-in-law Raymond Brooks joined the effort, and they formed Hill & Brooks Coffee Co.

In the 1980s, the company expanded from distributing to roasting its own coffee.

Brooks became ill with cancer in 1993 and sold his share to Hill. That deal came under scrutiny when Brooks' wife - Hill's sister - alleged in a lawsuit that Leroy Hill had taken advantage of Brooks' struggle with cancer to clinch a cheap buyout. The lawsuit was dismissed in 1996.

That same year, Hill was convicted in federal court on fraud charges stemming from his purchase of 80 acres of state timberland beside his Grand Bay estate. By maneuvering to rig two bids, Hill paid $48,400 for land that was appraised at more than three times that amount, according to trial testimony.

After serving 13 months at a federal prison camp in Georgia, Hill returned to lead his coffee enterprise in 1999, officially renaming it the Leroy Hill Coffee Co.

Hill was 76 when he died in June 2009 after a brief illness.

In a recent interview, Spear said that an inheritance agreement never existed, and the family's claims otherwise are "all totally false."

The children's lawsuit, filed in Mobile County Circuit Court last year, was dismissed by Judge James Wood after Debbie Hill argued in court filings that the case was in the wrong venue and should instead be heard by a family relations judge.

The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals this month reversed that ruling on the issue of an inheritance agreement, reviving the case and sending it back to Wood's courtroom.

The appeals court did rule that any arguments about an insurance payment for Bonnie Hill should be heard in family court.

Three of Hill's children are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, although Kilborn said that the fourth child would also take part-ownership in the family business.

Kilborn said that even the inheritance agreement never turns up, he will ask a jury to consider the testimony of Bonnie Hill and her children as enough proof that it did exist and that the children deserve the business and farm.

"The shame of it is, the children still love their dad," the lawyer said.